Time is short, but love is forever.
Our Time is Short….
It sounds so cliché but it truly does only take the blink of an eye for your entire life to change - what’s always been so familiar is no longer and you can feel as though the rug has been pulled from under you. That’s how I felt when I walked into that doctor’s office with my mum in February 2019, hearing those words that no one ever thinks they will have to hear - terminal cancer.
My mum’s name is Karen and she was truly my best friend. I followed her around whenever I could, to the grocery store, to soccer or even just to get petrol. Looking back I probably annoyed the shit out of her but she’d never say. Everyone in mum and I’s life knew how close we were that’s when they heard the news of mums diagnosis - metastatic pancreatic cancer, the phrases, ‘why YOUR mum’ or ‘why is this happening to YOU’ were said to me non stop. They do say that the best people are dealt the worst cards, but that doesn’t provide any comfort when your mum is this good person.
Mum was a devoted high school teacher for over 25 years at the same school. She loved working with the senior classes as she taught classes such as design, textiles, food tech, hospitality (and for a brief stint year 8 maths!) and she therefore enjoyed watching her students create beautiful major works for their HSC! However, as school teachers do so often, she was constantly overloaded with work - anytime she wasn’t at work, she was marking, creating lesson plans, reading essays etc. Her main relief was in her sport - netball and soccer in her later years, where her long legs led her to be a flying gazelle on any sporting field or court. I loved watching mum play soccer, and I have regrets that now I’m a young adult I will never have the opportunity to play alongside her, though I know she’s always sitting on my sidelines cheering me on.
Mum had had a number of ‘gut’ issues throughout her life, namely Crohn’s and Coeliac disease, but in late 2018 she began having pains in her upper abdomen which later revealed cancer in her pancreas, liver and lungs. It was within a week of finding this out she had started chemo and her doctor had reluctantly told us he predicted she would be with us for a little over 12 months as she was considered young for her diagnosis. Mum planned short manageable trips for our little family to Byron and Victoria in between her chemo sessions. Looking back they would have to be the thing I am most grateful for, especially as we weren’t much of a holiday family, so to create those memories when mum was still well enough to enjoy herself is something I’ll cherish forever. After a number of hospital stays due to large blood clots, about 5 months after her diagnosis, they found the cancer had travelled around her body and wrapped itself around her spinal cord. Radiation was next to try and subside the pain by stopping the cancer growth as much as possible, which meant a transfer to a larger hospital with more resources. After a few weeks without a great improvement, they offered mum a spot at a rehabilitation / palliative care facility where they were hoping she could utilise the rehab facilities and staff there to eventually come home. However a few weeks passed and she was declining. In severe pain all day everyday and nothing catching up with it - barely eating and making death stares at me whenever I tried to push those nutritional milk drinks on her! Although this was truly a tragic and traumatic time for mum and our family, I will always take comfort in the fact that she was always herself - funny, realistic and sarcastic. Even when the morphine was amped up to max and she would be mid conversation with someone and then just fall asleep, or she would suddenly realise she was late for her AFL game (morphine is a hell of a drug let me tell you!), she never ceased to laugh at herself and make jokes at her own expense. Mum passed peacefully in her sleep with myself and my brother by her side in the very early hours of August 21st 2019.
As I knew mum’s diagnosis was terminal and they used the words ‘palliative care’ in our first meeting with the doctor, it was a strange feeling to almost secretly prepare myself for mum’s death, while always holding out for that hope that somehow she wouldn’t actually die. It’s something I rarely let out as I felt incredibly guilty just thinking about my life after mum, but after reading about ‘anticipatory grief’, I found comfort in knowing this was extremely common. Coming face to face with those days and weeks and months without mum were similar to what I had expected but also not exactly. Obviously everyone’s experience of grief is different, but I found what I believe to be mum’s strength within me to continue on and just get on with things as best I could.
I have an amazing and large support network of an endless amount of people who make life so much easier and remind me of mum all the time, which I believe is what supports me the most through this life without her. I do occasionally think of my future milestones I won’t have mum by my side - getting married, having children etc, which can really get me down at times. But it’s in these moments I know I have her with me always and also makes me excited to become a mum myself and create my own bond with my own family.
In loving memory from her daughter, Carly.